Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Thanks. You know I shoot my own film, right?”

I’d missed that. Apparently that’s pretty unusual. “I didn’t.”

“Yeah, in the late nineties I was a freelance assistant cameraperson. At a time when there were no female camerapeople at all.”

“What do you shoot with?”

“You know cameras?”

“No.”

“I mostly use the Sony FS7 and Zeiss Super Speed prime lenses.”

“Well, you really captured the texture of prison. The feel of it. The squalor.”

“You’ve been?”

“Only on visits.”

“Well, that doc entailed spending a lot of time in maximum-security prisons talking to criminals and getting them to ignore the fact that there’s a big camera pointed in their face.”

“Huh.” I paused for a moment. “So do you consider your father a criminal?”

She compressed her lips, nodded slowly. “He’s not a good man,” she said.

“Well, we have that in common,” I said.

She hugged herself, a strange self-consoling gesture. There was something lovely about the woman, but at the same time, broken. She looked small and fragile, almost birdlike.

“But he’s supposed to be a marketing genius,” I said. “Right?”

“‘Genius.’” She laughed. “He used to fly doctors to bogus ‘seminars,’ like golf trips to Pebble Beach. He flew doctors to parties in Cancun. And whenever he encountered holdouts — doctors who wouldn’t prescribe Oxydone because they were worried about what it would do to people — he’d dangle the Kimball speaker’s bureau in front of them. Which meant the doctor just had to give a fifteen-minute talk at dinner and he’d get a thousand bucks. Even if no one showed up. That’s called graft. Kickbacks.”

“That’s a kind of genius.”

“A twisted kind, yeah. But do you know what type of marketing my father really excels at? Marketing the Kimball name. Making it seem like we’re all great philanthropists, lovers of truth and beauty. Which he does by spreading around money. Getting the Kimball name etched in stone. Notice it’s mostly art museums and universities and hospitals that he gives to? That’s because those places elevate us. Ennoble us.”

The list of places to which the Conrad Kimball Foundation gave millions of dollars was impressive. The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, the Louvre. Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Mass General in Boston. The Central Park Conservancy. There was the Kimball Library at Oxford, even the Kimball Escalator at the Tate Modern. “Come on,” I said, thinking of my father. “Dirty money makes the art world go round. MoMA, the Met, Lincoln Center — they were all founded with dirty money. Rockefeller and Carnegie were robber barons. Your dad’s just following a well-worn path.”

“You know what I find fascinating? He’s given hundreds of millions of dollars to art museums, claims to be a big lover of the arts, and in reality he has no interest in my documentaries.”

I nodded. “That reminds me. I spent a little time with your older brother, Paul. Not what I expected.” I hesitated for a moment. “I see what you mean about him not taking you seriously.”

“Right? Paul was always a huge disappointment to me. You expect your older brother to be sort of nurturing, guiding you along — big brother, you know? Even being my half brother. But Paul was none of those things. He was absent. Went his own way. Lives in his own bizarro world.”

“But could he have killed Maggie Benson? Does he have it in him?”

“I don’t honestly know.”

“He doesn’t appear to be interested in Kimball Pharma. Like you.”

“Like me ? Oh, don’t underestimate me, Nick. I get enough of that from my family. They dismiss me as some woolly-headed artist when the truth is, I know more about market share and prescription data and what debt load we’re carrying than Megan does, I’ll bet. We all get monthly board packets with the company’s financials, and believe me, I always read all the materials. I know what the gross revenues are in South America to the dollar.”

“Why?”

A smile. “You have to know your enemy.”

“So why not go to sales conferences?”

“Unnecessary. A waste of time.”

I hoped she was wrong.

She reclined her seat and a few minutes later drifted into a nap, while I worked on my laptop. The Wi-Fi was nice and fast. I looked up titles of books by Neil deGrasse Tyson, sent a list to Dorothy to try as many possible passwords on the encrypted folder. I called her to check in.

Then my phone rang. It was Gabe Heller’s mom, Lauren, in DC.

“Have you talked to Gabe recently?” she asked.

“Yesterday. Why?”

“Because I got a statement addressed to him from Schwab, the discount stockbrokers? So naturally I opened it, and I almost freaked out. What the hell is he doing with an account worth four point six million dollars?”

“There it is,” I said. “That’s what’s been going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take a picture of that Schwab statement and email it to me, okay?” I hung up and explained no further, because I wanted to talk to Gabe right away.

I didn’t even look at my watch. I called Gabe, got no response, and texted him, Call me NOW .

This time he called me right back.

“I want to know what stock tips my father has been giving you,” I said.

There was a long, long pause.

Finally, he said, “Who told you?”

I explained about how his mother had opened his brokerage statement.

He was clearly not ready for this conversation. He hesitated and stumbled and eventually confessed that Victor had told him how to open an account with a stockbroker, and then gave him information on how to access an offshore account of his based in the Channel Islands that was worth half a million dollars.

Gabe had wired that half million to Schwab and bought what were called “put” options on the stock of a big telecom company that had been in the news a lot recently because of some accounting scandal. Apparently Victor had given Gabe a lesson on how to do this. Gabe is a quick study. When the public announcement came that the big telecom company’s earnings were going to fall short, the stock dropped and Gabe Heller had netted $4.6 million.

I didn’t have to ask Gabe where Victor got his inside information. I remembered reading that one of the white-collar criminals just confined to the same prison as Victor Heller was the CFO of that same telecom company.

I had no doubt that the two quickly became friends.

“I don’t get what you’re so upset about,” Gabe said.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “That’s insider trading.”

“But... I’m not an insider!”

“You’re a secondhand tippee, and the Supreme Court says that counts as insider trading. You could get caught, and you’re old enough to go to prison like your dad.”

“Grandpa said there was nothing illegal about it!”

“Victor has, shall we say, a loose understanding of the law. Do you know what insider trading is?”

“Not really.”

I explained to him that buying stocks or even options on stocks with inside information was cheating and it was wrong. Also illegal. I told him about how the SEC watched for sneaky transactions like this. He could go to prison for twenty years. Victor was already there. To him, it would make no difference.

“But... But I’m going to buy Nana a house. She’s always saying her condo is too small. And how about if I donate some of it to a nonprofit that fights opioid addiction? I’m sure there’s a bunch of those.”

“Don’t spend any of it,” I said. “We have to figure out what to do about this. I don’t want you going to prison like your father and your grandfather.”